Monoculture (computer science)
In computer science, a monoculture is a community of computers that all run identical software. All the computer systems in the community thus have the same vulnerabilities, and, like agricultural monocultures, are subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a successful attack.
The concept is significant when discussing computer security and viruses. Clifford Stoll wrote in 1989 after dealing with the Morris worm:
Dan Geer has argued that Microsoft is a monoculture, since a majority of the overall number of workstations connected to the Internet are running versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, many of which are vulnerable to the same attacks. Internet applications have also been shown to suffer from software monoculture.
